Twin Attacks Target Israelis

November 29, 2002|By James Bennet The New York Times

JERUSALEM — In coordinated assaults in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa on Thursday, terrorists fired shoulder-launched missiles at an Israeli passenger jet, missing their target, minutes before three suicide bombers drove up to the doors of an Israeli-owned hotel and detonated their explosives.

The bombers killed themselves and at least 12 others -- nine of them Kenyans and three of them Israelis -- and wounded dozens more. In the chaos of black smoke, screams and burning thatch, the blast gutted the resort hotel, the Paradise.

Israelis who no doubt had hoped to take advantage of the Hanukkah holiday to escape to the seaside found themselves engulfed instead by the too-familiar horrors of a suicide attack: The smell of burned flesh, the sight of the stunned and staggering wounded -- a man with a deep slash in his back, a girl with a small hole in her stomach -- and of those who were completely still. Witnesses said a single hand was found about 300 feet from the site of the explosion.

"It was like being back home, it really was," one survivor, Kelly Hartog, said by telephone from Mombasa. "It's the same pictures. And in one of these surreal things, when we got to the hotel here and saw CNN, it could have been a downtown street in Jerusalem."

Al-Qaida a suspect

Israeli and Kenyan officials said that, though there were competing claims of responsibility for the attack, it was possible al-Qaida was behind the attacks. But the Bush administration cautioned that it was premature to blame al-Qaida.

Hours after the attacks in Kenya, in a separate assault inside Israel, terrorists tied to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction turned guns on Israelis as they went to the polls to choose the leader of the dominant right-wing party, the Likud. Six Israelis were killed in that incident, in the town of Beit Shean in the northern Jordan Valley.

From his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush issued a statement deploring the violence in Israel and Kenya. "Today's attacks underscore the continuing willingness of those opposed to peace to commit horrible crimes," Bush said.

As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's citizens came under attack abroad and at home, the Israeli leader declared Thursday night that terrorists did not "look for reasons to kill Jews. Their aim is to kill young and old, women and children, only because they are Jews." He urged voters to go the polls.

Early returns indicated that Sharon easily won the Likud primary, and with it a mandate from his party to pursue the elusive peace and security he promised when he first ran two years ago.

Sharon charged Israel's spy agency, the Mossad, with responsibility for tracking down those behind the attacks in Mombasa. If al-Qaida was responsible, it would be the first time the group had targeted Israelis since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, although its leader, Osama bin Laden, has sought to rally Arabs to his banner by inveighing against Israel.

The attack raised the prospect that Israel might take a higher-profile role in the pursuit of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists worldwide, a change that security analysts said could alarm Arab states and complicate the Bush administration's plans for possible military action against Iraq.

Israel's foreign minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called it "quite possible" that al-Qaida was behind the attack but said Israel would explore other possibilities. Some Israeli officials said the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah might be involved.

As in the attack on a Bali nightclub last month that killed more than 180 people, most of them tourists, the twin assaults in Kenya occurred in a sandy resort town known more for its thriving tourist trade than for any radical politics.

Mombasa is a popular destination for Israeli tourists, and those attacked Thursday -- both aboard the plane and in the Paradise hotel -- were on package tours set up by an Israeli tourist agency that runs weekly flights there. With a kosher restaurant and a synagogue, whose torah scrolls were rescued from the bomb-fueled blaze Thursday, the Paradise resort hotel was particularly popular with Israeli tourists.

Planning evident

A senior official with the protection and security division of Israel's Shin Bet security agency said the attack was carefully plotted.

"We're looking at a very planned, organized attack against Israelis in Mombasa," the official said. "They were looking for Israelis to kill. If the incident succeeded, it would have resulted in the deaths of over three to four hundred Israelis."

He said that Israel had learned of two competing claims of responsibility for the attack, but, declining to name the groups, he said that intelligence agents did not consider the claims solid.